Two Hackers Plead Guilty to Creating IoT-based Mirai DDoS Botnet

The U.S. federal officials have arrested two hackers who have pleaded guilty to computer-crimes charges for creating and distributing Mirai botnet that crippled some of the world’s biggest and most popular websites by launching the massive DDoS attacks last year.

According to the federal court documents unsealed Tuesday, Paras Jha and Josiah White were indicted by an Alaska court last week on six charges for their role in massive cyber attacks conducted using Mirai botnet.
Mirai is a piece of nasty IoT malware that scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other Internet of Things devices which are still using their default passwords and then add them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks on websites and Internet infrastructure.

“Jha and his co-conspirators successfully infected hundreds of thousands of internet-connected computing devices, including computers in Alaska and other states, with malicious software,” the plea agreement said.

Paras Jha and his business partner Josiah White are the same people who were outed by blogger Brian Krebs earlier this year after his blog was also knocked offline by a massive 620 Gbps of DDoS attack using Mirai botnet.